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upstart writes:

Forget Smart Cities, ‘Stupid’ Infrastructure Is The Solution For Future Transportation:

In 1997, David Isenberg published the important essay, “The Rise of the Stupid Network,” in which he details how the internet took over the world by being as simple as possible. Name derives from the 1980s marketing name the telephone companies had for their new systems, “Intelligent Network” or “IN.” The IN tried to put the intelligence for new phone functionality in the network, in the infrastructure. The phone company designed, built and managed innovation in telecoms. You connected with your standard plain old phone. (Younger readers may not know it, but everybody back then had a basic phone on their desks with wires coming out of it which you used to talk to other people.)

When the smarts were in the infrastructure, we relied on the infrastructure for the innovation. And why not, the Bell Labs scientists were among the best in the world?

The internet flipped that upside-down. The core design of the network is dead-simple. In fact, it’s essentially the same design today as 40 years ago! Even so, we’ve seen the greatest period of innovation in human history on top of that stupid infrastructure, and it’s not a coincidence. On the internet, all the smarts are in the edge devices. Your phone. Your laptop. The web server that sent you this web page. Everything is there, even the negotiation of network link quality and speed which you might imagine should be in the infrastructure, which is much closer to those factors. The internet itself just delivers postcards from A to B, really fast. Its only job is to figure how to move those postcards.

When the smarts moved to the edges, they got a lot smarter. Anybody could innovate. Nobody needed the phone company’s permission, the way it used to be. A few folks in Europe wrote a program called Skype which took over most the world’s long distance business for a while. They didn’t ask the network companies to get involved or even give permission to eat their lunch, and they certainly would not have received it.

As noted above, the problem is that today, you can’t know the future. People in the computer industry have gotten used to that idea, where the capabilities of the computers and networks have been doubling in performance every 1.5 years for over 5 decades. You can’t plan for 2030 in 2021 so you don’t. Instead, you keep what you must build simple and put as much as possible into software. That’s because you can change all your software in 2030 when you learn the reality of the future, and it’s free to deploy it, even though not to write it.

The internet’s design of stupid network and smart devices comes to transportation through both the robocar and the mobile phone in the car. Stupid roads and smart cars, not smart roads.

Original Submission